Why Home Depot (HS) Stock Is Higher This Afternoon

Shares of Home Depot (HD) are up as the home improvement retailer moves deeper into online distribution.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Home Depot Inc. (HD) are up 1.23% to $77.52 as the home improvement retailer moves deeper into online distribution.

"The retail model forever was to increase sales through opening additional units, but as you added stores to a finite group of households, each store becomes less profitable," company CEO Frank Blake told the Wall Street Journal.

"So the decision was made to stop opening additional boxes," said Blake.

This comes as Home Depot makes a hard turn toward the Internet in the face of changing shopper habits and fast diminishing returns from new store openings., the Journal noted.

TheStreet Ratings team rates HOME DEPOT INC as a Buy with a ratings score of A. TheStreet Ratings Team has this to say about their recommendation:

"We rate HOME DEPOT INC (HD) a BUY. This is based on the convergence of positive investment measures, which should help this stock outperform the majority of stocks that we rate. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its growth in earnings per share, notable return on equity, good cash flow from operations, increase in stock price during the past year and reasonable valuation levels. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that we evaluated."